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The Bronze Statue from Cerigotto and the Study of Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Extract

The article of Mr. Frost in the preceding number of this Journal (pp. 217, seq.) gives me an opportunity to protest against what I consider a dangerous development of archaeological study in our days. I must thank the Editors for having, in spite of the great pressure upon their space, granted me a few pages in the present number to record this protest; while I must defer to a later issue of this Journal the fuller exposition of my views on the Cerigotto Bronze, the statue of Agias from Delphi, on Scopas and Lysippus.

The protest—or, perhaps better, the warning—which I wish to publish concerns the course given in the present day to the study of style in Classical Art. To this study, as practised by the late Heinrich v. Brunn, Archaeology owes its greatest advance; and the serious students of Mediaeval and Renaissance art have borrowed these methods from classical archaeology, thus opening out a vast field of accurate information. I have myself devoted my energies to its cultivation and endeavoured to lay down the principles of its proper application in the first chapter of my Essays on the Art of Pheidias published in 1885. I believe, moreover, that we are only at the beginning of this line of work which promises such great results ia the future. Nor need we remain content with the establishment and amplification of our knowledge of Greek art in the great classical period, as little as in Greek literature study, and especially research, are to be confined to the great classical writers.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1904

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References

1 Such well-known works as the Apollo of Tenea, the Diadumenos from Delos, the portrait of Sophocles (I suppose the one in the Lateran) might be given without reference; though it must help the non-specialist reader to be referred to some illustration. But when the ‘Portrait of Iucundus of Pompeii,’ the bronze Satyr at Munich, statues in the Museum of Athens and in the British Museum are mentioned without reference, we have the right to ask for more details.

2 Cf. my remarks on Furtwängler, 's treatment of this artist in Argive Heraeum, vol. i. pp. 164Google Scholarseq.

3 I am happy to find that Mr.Svoronos, J. N., in his remarkable publication, Das Athener Nationalmuseum ii. pp. 66 seq. Pl. XII.Google Scholar, had also maintained that this statue represented a combatant. I am not, however, convinced from his plate that the crouching fighter had an opponent fighting on foot before him. It was more probably a horseman or centaur.

4 I have to thank Mr.Murray, John for permission to use this block, already published in the Monthly Review, May 1901, p. 124Google Scholar.